The Mailbird team knows how important your privacy is. What you do in your inbox is for your eyes only, and we protect that by never scanning the content of your emails or storing any un-encrypted or un-anonymized personal information on our servers. Everything we you tell us is hidden from prying eyes, and often even from our own. If you’ve been curious about what we do with your information when you sign up for and use Mailbird, then this post is for you. A completely transparent view of what we know about you and what we do with that information.

What’s Not Anonymous?

The information that you give us directly is stuff that we hold onto. This is stuff like your email address, name, and any information you send us through error reports to [email protected] We will never sell this information to anyone or use it in a way that you have not asked us to. Mailbird also pings the server when you launch it, letting us know who is actively using Mailbird and who has stopped using it. This is the only unanonymized information we collect that is not given to us directly by you. We use that active/inactive information to find our most enthusiastic users so that we can get in touch with them and hear what they like and want improved, and so that we can see who dropped off and ask them what we could have done to improve their experience.

What’s Anonymous?

All the other information we collect is fully anonymized and often encrypted. We collect fully anonymous data on user activity in Mailbird, so we can see which features/shortcuts are most often used, which features/shortcuts are never used, etc. We use this information to choose which features to develop next, which we can drop, and what users enjoy the most in Mailbird. Using anonymous data will also help the Mailbird team understand how much time the average user is saving when the super snazzy and highly anticipated Wingman feature is released. Learning how much time Mailbird users save in their inboxes, and what features save them the most time helps us continually improve Mailbird to reach our ultimate goal: Helping you take back the time you spend in your inbox, so you can spend it doing what you enjoy in life, instead of archiving, replying, and composing all day. Finally, we collect anonymized meta-data from our user’s social profiles, telling us about gender, age, etc.

Why are we telling you this?

Because we believe in transparency and honesty. With all the email reading and privacy invasion scandals going around, we want to make sure that you know your information is safe with us, and that you know exactly what we do with it. The only things we know about you specifically are the things you tell us directly when you sign up or send us error reports, and knowledge of the last time your Mailbird pinged the server to say it was opened. Everything else is completely anonymous. We know the average age and gender and inbox productivity of our users as a whole, be we don’t know any specifics about any individual user. And, of course, we will never sell this information to anyone, or use it for anything other than Mailbird.